Medical complex fans city's growth.

• Position: Special Advertising Section: Regional Focus

Beauty and brains. Not a bad combination. And Greenville is a wellspring for both with a thriving student community and world-class health care, education and business.

The Eastern North Carolina city is home to 20 parks and six museums. That's the beauty. And some of the world's leading academic, health-care and industry professionals call it home. That's the brains. It adds up to a spot in Money magazine's Top 50 places to live.

One of its hospitals, Pitt County Memorial, also recently was named among the nation's top 100 centers for treatment of cardiovascular disease by Evanston, Ill.-based Solucient Leadership Institute, a hospital-grading company. This ranking should turn heads and make North Carolinians take another look at Greenville -- which is a far cry from the hog-farming, tobacco-growing stereotype usually associated with Eastern North Carolina. "As someone who is originally from Ohio and who has lived and traveled around the world, I truly believe that the quality of life in Greenville rivals that of any city," says Tony Khoury, president of The East Group, an engineering and architectural design firm with offices around the country and headquarters in Greenville.

Greenville, population 60,966, is one of North Carolina's fastest-growing cities. Now the state's 13th-largest, its population has grown nearly 36% since 1990. Pitt County's 2001 population was about 135,000, the 14th largest in the state, and officials expect that number to grow to nearly 200,000 by 2030.

The driving forces behind Greenville's growth and development have been East Carolina University, its Brody School of Medicine and Pitt County Memorial Hospital. "The city has grown as a result of the medical school and regional hospital growth, which has created affiliated businesses and organizations in Greenville," Mayor Don Parrott says. The resulting influx of doctors, students, health-care providers and other professionals has helped transform Greenville from a sleepy town into a thriving city.

For decades, Greenville was recognized mainly for its strong tobacco market and small, state-supported teachers college. However, in the 1960s, the town's growth accelerated. The college, at the time named East Carolina Teachers College, had grown to the third-largest state-supported school in North Carolina, and enrollment had topped 8,000. In 1967, it became East Carolina University. Today, enrollment has surpassed 19,000.

The other seed for Greenville's big economic push was planted in 1968 when drug maker and researcher Burroughs Wellcome built a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. In 1997, Catalytica Fine Chemicals purchased the plant. Today, it is owned by DSM Pharmaceuticals, a Dutch drug developer...